All American Boy (2 page)

That's Brown's Mill in his memory: Helen Piatrowski's screams bouncing off the brownstone of St. John the Baptist Church, echoing down Main Street through the abandoned factories into the streets of Dogtown, and finally to the little cul-de-sac where Wally grew up, in a ranch with an American flag out front and an unused basketball hoop growing rustier with each passing year over the garage.

He turns off the ignition in the driveway and looks up at his childhood home

It's the same. Even the trees and shrubs look the same, as if his mother had kept them trimmed back to what they were decades ago, frozen in time, like this entire town.

He sees a hand pull back the curtains of the large picture window. It flutters for a moment and then the curtains fall still.

Once, in another time, another world, Wally had loved his mother more than anything else in his life. He loved how soft she was, how blond, how without makeup she had no eyebrows or eyelashes, so fair was her color. “Dear Angel,” the fellas had written across their pictures in her high school yearbook, which Wally had loved to peruse, looking at all the faces. “Dear Angel,” the fellas had written. “Don't forget about me.”

She would later tell him which ones had gone off to die in the war.

I think I may be losing my mind
.

Wally takes a breath and opens his car door.

His mother had never reacted to the scandal he'd caused with Alexander Reefy. Never. His father had hit him, knocked him across the room—but Mom had never said a word, not even when the papers were full of it, not even when the other boys began taunting him, not even when Wally ran away from home and refused to leave the refuge of Miss Aletha's house. Not once had Mom spoken of it, not then, nor at any time since.

She knows nothing of my life
, Wally thinks as he walks slowly up to the door.
Nothing
.

Please, Walter. Would you come home?

She opens the door and looks up at him with those round blue eyes of hers. They haven't changed. Big and round and blue. Penciled eyebrows arch across her pale powdered forehead.

“Hello, Mom.”

“Oh, Walter, Walter, thank you for coming.”

The house smells exactly the same as he remembers it. Perfume. Powder. Soap. A lady smell. That's why his father always hated it here, why he was never home longer than he had to be. Dad blamed Mom for making their son gay. Wally knew this for a fact, even if he had never heard his father utter those words.

“How many years it's been, Walter.”

Does she expect an embrace? Wally doesn't offer one.

“You look well, Mom,” he tells her.

“You, too, Walter. So handsome. The spitting image of your father.”

She's wrong: he's blond, as Scandinavian as she is, blond and fair and blue-eyed. His father was dark, black Irish, black as night. But Wally makes no objection. He just strides past his mother into the living room. On a card table sits a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of the Taj Mahal.

He turns and looks back at his mother. “So why is Officer Garafolo calling me looking for Kyle?”

“Oh, Walter, Walter, he keeps coming by here, harassing me, asking me all sorts of questions—”

“Is that why you called me? Why you said you thought you were losing your mind?”

She touches her forehead with her fingertips. “I said that? About my mind?”

He glares at her. “What's going on, Mother? Was Kyle in some sort of trouble?”

“Oh, he was always in trouble. You know that. He was a bad boy. He wasn't like you, Walter. You were the good boy and he was the bad one. That's what your poor Aunt Bernadette always said. You know that.”

“No, I don't, Mom. I don't remember anything about Brown's Mill and really don't care to.”

His eye catches the framed photograph on the wall over the telephone set. The three of them. Mom, Dad, Wally. Wally is eight. He wears one of those big wide striped ties from the seventies. His father is in his navy uniform. Somber, angry, imperious, unsmiling.

Yes, the spitting image.

You were the good boy, Walter
.

“It's really upsetting the way that policeman keeps coming by here,” his mother is saying. “I'm at my wit's end about it. All the questions. I don't know what to do.”

I lived here once
. Wally has to repeat the thought to himself as he looks around the place.
I lived here. In this house. For sixteen years
.

Here, in this very room, he watched
Land of the Lost
and
Josie and the Pussycats
every Saturday morning, reeling from a sugar buzz of Lucky Charms. Over there in the dining room he ate his mother's turkey loaf and “Swedish goulash”—a mishmash of hamburger and Franco-American spaghetti that he'd loved so well. And in the bathroom, from the time he was twelve, he masturbated looking at pictures of bodybuilders in the ads in the back of Superman comic books.

“Are you still in there, Wally?”

His father would bang his fist against the door. Wally twitches a little, remembering.

“Jesus Christ, hurry up! What do you do in there anyway?”

Ah, but his father would find out. Once, when the door wasn't locked, Dad had caught him. He said nothing. He just grabbed the comic book from Wally's hand, glared down at it, and tore it up savagely, leaving the pieces on the floor.

“You can stay here, Wally,” his mother is telling him. “Your room is still—”

“The same?” He laughs, looking over at her as she wrings her hands. “No, thank you, Mom. I've made other arrangements.”

She looks hurt, but just for a moment. She's too caught up with losing her mind to spare much time for him. And wasn't that always the way?

“I need your help, Walter.
Please
.”

He sighs. “I can't give you the kind of help you need, Mom. You need a professional.”

“Just one small favor, Wally. That's all I ask.”

He studies her face. It, too, is the same. She's seventy-three, but she could easily pass for twenty years younger. Her blond hair has faded to gray, yet her eyes are still fluorescent blue, her skin still creamy and smooth. Only her hands have aged: wrinkled and spotted, with the veins raised and purple.

She implores him now with those hands. “One favor, Wally.”

He looks at her. “What's going on, Mother?”

“I need your help.”

“What kind of help?”

“I need you to get rid of a crate for me.”

He blinks. “A crate?”

“Yes. Take it down to the swamp in Dogtown. It's too heavy for me to move. But I need to get rid of it as soon as possible.”

Wally leans in close, studying her eyes.

“Will you do it for me, Walter? Please?”

“Why should I do anything for you, Mother?” he whispers, only inches now from her face. “What did you ever do for me?”

“Please, Walter. Please.”

He backs off. “Where is it? This crate?”

“In the basement, Walter. Behind the furnace.”

In Wally's last show, some moth-eaten musical touring upstate New York, he met an old woman. She was about his mother's age, fair and pretty like her too. Her name was Cora, and she'd been in show business since the days of vaudeville, tap-dancing behind Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor at the age of eight. Now the poor old thing was always forgetting her lines, and the director, fed up, was going to drop her. All she had were three simple sentences in a scene where she played a bag lady, but they always came out wrong, and in reverse order. So Wally cooked up a plan: he wrote her lines down on his shirt with a black permanent marker so she could read them. It meant he had to keep his back to the audience and never got to show his face, but Cora got to keep the job, and she was tremendously grateful.

One night, after the show, they sat in a coffee shop, still in their makeup and costumes. “Do you have someone special in your life?” Cora asked him.

Wally considered the question. “I have some good friends.”

“But no special one among them?”

He hesitated. “I did. But he died.”

Cora smiled. “What was his name?”

“Ned. His name was Ned.”

“And was he your first love?”

“No,” he admitted. “But close to it.”

“And there's been no one since?”

Wally thought of the boys who'd paraded through his bedroom in the years since Ned had died. Boys only a few years older than he had been when he'd sent Alexander Reefy to jail.

“No,” he told Cora. “No one since.”

“But the world is a large place, Wally. There are others out there.”

“Yes. But none like him.”

“Of course not like him,” Cora said. “Never like him.”

In that short conversation, Cora had learned more about him than his mother had in his whole lifetime.

Heading down the staircase into the basement, Wally realizes that while Brown's Mill may not have changed, while his mother might not have changed, one important thing had. Once Wally had known all of Brown's Mill's secrets. He knew what was hidden where, which bodies might be found in whatever closet.

But no more.

Wally lifts the lid of his mother's crate and looks inside.

2

THE BASEMENT

Until she killed him, he'd been a moody sort with yellow hair buzzed close to his head and a wicked little smile that dared her to do it. And so, one day, she did. It was a bright, sunny autumn day, with orange maple leaves twirling through the air, and he was asleep on the couch. She had just finished working in the garden, turning the mulch for the winter, and she carried the iron rake in with her, raising it up and smashing it down into his face, aiming for his temple, while he slept.

Regina Day is a good woman. Everyone in Brown's Mill would agree to that. So much tragedy in her life: her mother, her sister, her husband, her son. Yet every Sunday, there she is, attending services at St. Peter's Lutheran church at the south end of Main Street. She's always giving generously whenever those adorable little Puerto Rican children come around from Dogtown, ringing her bell, collecting for the heart fund or the leukemia drives. And everybody in town gets a Christmas card from Regina, even that scandalous Gladys Carroll and the disgraced former Mayor Winslow.

Yes, Regina Day is a good woman. It's just that one day she'd had enough, and so she killed the boy. She was surprised by how easy it was to decide to do it. Never in her life had she made a decision so easily. She usually fretted and worried and hemmed and hawed. But this time it was a snap.

Even the killing was easy. The only difficult part was the cleaning up afterward. He'd gushed a great deal of blood, and an Oriental vase that had been her grandmother's had shattered when his arms flailed out and over the sides of the couch. Mopping and sweeping was what took a long time, and dragging the boy's body downstairs into the basement and stuffing it into the crate was especially arduous. Regina was an old woman, after all, seventy-three this year, with arthritis in her legs, and the boy had weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds.

But once it was done, she sat down at her kitchen table and had a cup of orange tea and some graham crackers. Once her breath returned, she dialed the number for the police.

“Hello? Is this the Brown's Mill police department? Yes, this is Regina Day. May I speak with Officer Garafolo? Oh, yes, hello, how are you? I'm fine. No, no, it's not anything like that. I just—well, I want to report a missing person.” Pause. “My nephew. Kyle Francis Day. He was in the navy. I think he's gone AWOL.”

“Mother!” Walter calls up the stairs. “There's nothing in this crate but a bunch of old linens!”

Regina stands at the top of the basement stairs looking down.

“No, no, Walter, don't look inside—”

Her son has appeared at the bottom of the stairs glaring up at her. “Why in God's name would you want to sink a crateful of linens into the swamp?”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Regina says, gripping hold of the banister and starting down the stairs. Her arthritis twinges but she keeps going. She brushes past her son to hurry round the furnace and peer down into the opened crate.

Linens.

She begins moving them aside, digging underneath. The crate is filled with musty old linens. And has been for fifteen years.

Regina closes the lid and sits down on top of the crate.

“Mom,” Walter says, and dare she think it? Is there a small hint of compassion in his voice? “What did you
think
was in that crate?”

“I—I'm not sure.”

“Are you on any medications that might be—?”

“No. Well, for my arthritis. But I've taken those for years.”

She lifts her eyes up at him. Yes, he does look like Robert.
Exactly
like Robert, so tall and handsome when she met him, resplendent in his uniform.

Would you come back to my room with me?
Robert had breathed in her ear.
Before I head off to face certain death in the jungles of the Mekong?

Oh, how Robert had dazzled her. He was younger than she was, and far more handsome than she deserved. In that moment, Regina had felt not like herself, but like her sister Rocky, who all the boys had fancied. Rocky—who was never afraid, who was always taking risks—

“Mom.”

She looks up at her son.

“Does this have anything to do with Kyle?”

Kyle.

Dear God, I'm afraid I'm losing my mind
…

“Mom,” Walter says again

It happened before. Why not again?

“
Mother!
Do you have any idea where Kyle went?”

Not in the crate. Why had she thought he was in the crate?

I buried him. I remember now. In the back yard. The shovel
…
Yes, I took the shovel and I dug. Beside the poplar trees
…